1. Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments setting forth the ideas described throughout this disclosure pertain to the field of computer systems. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more aspects of the disclosure enable a location activity search engine computer system that is configured to populate a database and provide search results from the database that include locations having desired activities and/or activities at desired locations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Travel recommendation search engines exist, however current implementations are extremely limited in the number of recommendations and destinations that are involved. For example, some recommendation engines associated with travel related websites are limited to the top 30 destinations and have only a few categories of general activities, e.g., “Night Life”, “Nature”, “Sports”, “Museums”. The resulting coarse granularity of destinations and recommendations does not provide a useful amount of information for detailed searching that many travelers desire. Hence, users are currently unable to see the true breadth, depth or variety of locations and activities that are associated with one another. For example, with current recommendation search engines, there is no way to find a comprehensive ranked list of the best surfing locations in an arbitrary country.
At the other end of the spectrum, a standard web search engine provides a very large amount of information associated with locations and activities. The information that is returned is unstructured however. The search results obtained from a standard web search engine do not describe what activities are available at a location, or what locations are best for an activity. The search results only show pages that contain the text that is used to search, whether relevant or not. For example, a search for “brazil surfing” returns 3,400,000 web pages from one such standard web search engine. Hence, a user cannot easily find the most relevant location and activity associations over the millions of web pages that include the search results returned from the search engine.
The problems with currently known travel related websites and search engines are many. Currently known travel related websites currently do not list a large number of specific locations, for example all of the surf spots in Brazil, since only the top 30 or so destinations in the world are provided as locations. In addition, surfing is generally not an activity that is listed in the short list of general categories of activities that are provided for selection on the websites. As opposed to currently known travel related websites, the standard search engines accessible over the Internet are incapable of providing a ranked list of surf spots in Brazil since so much raw data is provided as a result of the search. Although a user may be able to find a specific Internet blog where users discuss surfing, the user would have to wade through enormous amounts of information on various blogs to find information relevant to the best surf spots in a general location like Brazil. The user is in effect forced to create a ranked list themselves through a lengthy web page and blog research effort for example to find specific locations within Brazil to surf. The user must decide which websites or blogs rank the highest in relevancy in some ad hoc manner. The ranking is generally based on only a fraction of the reviews that exist throughout the Internet. Hence, there is no known solution that provides an intelligent ranked association of locations and activities that are of interest to a user.
Since there are no known solutions that provide intelligent ranked associations of locations and activities, there likewise are no solutions that take this approach a step further to provide search results having finer grained facets of locations such as searching for locations and activities with particular related parameters (e.g., weather), such as touring a monastery when the chance of snowfall is low, or in a country with no adverse travel advisories, or where a particular language is spoken, or where the cost of living is low, or where the crime rate is low. Likewise, there is no solution known that allows for facets of activities to be searched for, such as the particular types of fish or other creatures that are viewable when snorkeling, or the particular type of museum, i.e., modern, renaissance, etc., that are available for touring.
Although there are numerous sources of information that are related to travel that include associations between locations and activities, there is no known system that gathers documents from a vast array of sources, extracts associations between locations and activities and stores the associations in a database. Furthermore, there is no known system that provides searching and ranking of results obtained from this specific location and activity database. For at least the limitations described above there is a need for a location activity search engine computer system.